538 Brent D. Shaw
allowing ourselves to be led astray by Aristotelian concepts. This is where a thinker such
as Ibn Khaldûn might well be a better guide, if only because he was such a keen and
creative observer of his contemporary society (Lacoste 1984). In his discussion of the
cohesion, theasabiyyaas he calls it, of human groups in the Maghrib of his own time,
the unity that empowered them, Ibn Khaldûn paid rather less attention to the object
of our fascination—namely, how this cohesion is represented. He was more concerned
with why this happened and for what continuous sets of end-purposes (Gellner 1981:
86–98). One consistent cause was the ever-present threat of violent struggles, in both
towns and in the countryside, over basic resources. What he suggests is that the names
of social groups are similar to the parts of a language game in their utility—identities
that can be manipulated and exploited for the purposes of protection, advantage, and
exploitation in a competitive environment where group cohesion and solidarity matters
a lot. That is one part of the problem. But where are the more modern supplements to
be found? Concerns with abstractions such as cognitive categories and social boundaries
are helpful, but I find the more hands-on approach of Russian (Soviet) ethnographers,
writing in the 1960s and 1970s, and earlier, to be more useful for the types of research
problems that Roman historians in particular must confront (e.g., Dunn and Dunn 1974:
1–53; Bromleii, 1977; Bromley [Bromleii] and Dragadze in Gellner ed. 1980). Between
a world of hundreds of autonomous Greek poleis at one end of the temporal spectrum
and the many dozens of so-called barbarian frontier peoples of post-Roman antiquity at
the other, there was the presence of a huge unitary Mediterranean state. It is for their
formative queries into the nature of ethnic identity and formation within a large and
dominant state that these other studies are useful.
Given all of this, we might ask if there was any generally shared identity among the
indigenous populations of Roman Africa? Probably. This self-ascription is rather diffi-
cult to unearth. Most guesses, I think correctly, focus on a common language as the
main identifier operating at this level. There is widespread evidence, from the northern
regions of present-day Morocco to the highland areas of the Algerian–Tunisian border,
and in the hinterland of Tripolitania, of the use of a common script to express what mod-
ern historians have misleadingly called a “Libyan” language. It was a local language that,
despite three major distinctive regional variations in the script, bears a striking resem-
blance to the notation of the Tamazight spoken by the present-day Imazighen (singular:
Amazigh)—that is, peoples whom outsiders have labeled “Berbers.” It is a name that,
perhaps paradoxically, they have come to embrace today as their national self-identity
(Serra 1990; Fentress and Brett 1999; and, importantly, Ghazi Ben Maïssa 2007). Over
the great expanse of past time, however, there is no doubt that these same peoples spoke
Tamazight and that they thought of themselves as the Imazighen, meaning, as with many
indigenous social groups on our planet, quite simply “the people.”
REFERENCESBates, Oric. 1914.The Eastern Libyans: An Essay. London: Macmillan. Reprint: London, 1970.
Ben Abdullah, Z. Benzina. 1992. “Du coté d’Ammaedara (Haïdra), Musulamii et Musunii
Regiani.”AntAfr, 28: 139–45.